Santorum tears into Obama's SOTU

President Barack Obama’s new call for competitive investment is simply “wasteful government spending,” former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum wrote in an op-ed Thursday.

“Rather than letting the American entrepreneurial spirit ignite the free-market economic engine, Obama is again choosing to depend on government to lead us to economic prosperity,” he wrote in the Union Leader. “But when has government ever succeeded in doing this?”

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Santorum, who is eyeing a 2012 bid for the White House, tears apart Obama’s State of the Union address as “nothing more than a repackaging of the tried and true Washington-knows-better- than-you liberalism he has tried to force on the American public for the first half of his term.”

He accuses Obama of ignoring the ballooning deficit and entitlement reform, while tax revenue is stagnant. After two years in office, the “real unemployment rate” — including those who have stopped looking for work or are underemployed – is higher, he argues. And all of this has impeded the nation’s ability to engage countries like China.

While Santorum acknowledges that former President George W. Bush set the bailout precedent, he argues Obama has upped the ante.

“If they were in Las Vegas, you could say Obama saw George Bush’s bailouts and raised him a nearly trillion-dollar stimulus, a bailout of the American auto industry and a government takeover of the health care industry,” he wrote.